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Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

When the mayhem started! And its expansion pack made by interns!
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Toshiba-3
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Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by Toshiba-3 »

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Qtz contacted me this week and we talked about diverse C1 matters. He pointed me towards antique BRender artifacts :ssmile:

If you don't know it yet, Argonaut's BRender is the engine behind Carmageddon and Carmageddon 2.
A bit of in-depth information is available online, for example:
- Brender: The Real-Time 3D Renderer
- BRender Pixelmap
- FYI, here's Errol's complete PIX specs.

Argonaut's website is still accessible through the Wayback machine:
- Circa 1996
- Circa 1998

Both of these captures also link you to tech demos from that era, they are not easy to get running but some of them were made by... Stainless Software!
Amongst demos depicting mirrors, vertex colors, reflections, animations, etc., you'll find... PlayThing1 and BRoom. Both of them made by Stainless thus.

Image

PlayThing1 can only run in 8bit color depth mode. It can load C1 actors/models/materials/pixelmaps but it doesn't support aggregated MAT and PIX files. You'll see it was made to be used with any game made on BRender as it supports changing/editing palettes, lights, shadetabs and other obscure features.

BRoom must be run while in 8bit color depth mode as well in order to display correctly. You'll find this look quite similar to C1 in some aspects :ssmile: Flying vehicles with guns though :ssmile:

Image

To make things easier, I've uploaded PT1 and BRoom! to RR2000 (they requried additional files (BDD) to run), the sole thing you have to do is set their executable to launch in 256 colors mode.
I also added the I-War Texture Kit, Independance War was a game build on BRender too, and this kit includes TexConv.exe, the original PIX converter. Not sure it's that handy anyway, as we have CarmagEdit and more.
And my BDD collection, BRender Device Drivers from multiple BRender-based games. You can switch C1's with these but it seems like there's nothing to gain and some can crash the game :ssmile:

BRender artifacts at RR2000. I am Indiana Jones.


Seriously it's a lot of VERY interesting informations all around, as it depicts unknown features and some kind of history of the formats we're used to modify nowadays. Vertex colors, mirroring effect through blendtables, lights etc. They all need investigating.


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coffeycup
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by coffeycup »

Sounds intriguing. It's just too bad we're finding out now. After so many years!
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by Razor »

Great stuff, Tosh. I love diving into the past, especially when Stainless are involved. It's always so awesome to look back at gaming's past.
[ Razor @ Carmageddon Webmasters Alliance Network ] [ My Downloads ] [ My Carma Items ] [ Conversion lists ]
To download the BETA Mod and more information on my other work, visit me @ https://razor.cwaboard.co.uk
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by Harmalarm »

Interesting post. I tried plaything1 but the 3d graphics seemed all screwed up when I opened some models. I guess it is rather sensitive.

I wonder why carmageddon never incorporated vertex colors. As the engine so clearly is able to render them, it seems a big shame they didn't put it in the game. :(
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Toshiba-3
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by Toshiba-3 »

Yes it's really too bad we just found out now. Especially as PT1 seems very handy to setup C1 materials. It's possible to set the untextured gradient easily for example, the texture transformation matrix, load a specific shadetable and set the lighting in a wysiwyg way.

I'm suspecting Stainless might have done more games for Argonaut back then, I'm looking into FX Fighter at the moment, as the tech demo based on the game credits Stainless.

Here are the vehicles from BRoom, rendered into PT1 (they come with it anyway):
Image
I'll port them to C1 with as few changes as possible. They rely a lot on shade tables apparently, and these TABs where made for the GAMELET palette, so it might turn out to be a bit tricky to get them looking exactly the same.

Here's a screenshot of the mirror techdemo:
Image
I think it should be possible to achieve within C1. Must understand how it works first :ssmile:

Harm: Have you loaded the right palette to render the actors? And yes, I'd like to isolate vertex color information within the DAT file (I suppose it's set in there), can't run the techdemo yet thought, need dosbox.
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Harmalarm
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by Harmalarm »

oh wow, looking real neat.

I had a quick look at the dat files, but could not find anything new. It seems the dat files I checked only had model name,vertex, texture vertex, and face information. No multi material or vertex color info to be found.

Do you happen to know if the vertex colors are used somewhere anyway? Didn't you jump to conclusions? I checked all the demo descriptions and the brender specs but it doesnt seem to mention vertex colors after all... :(
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Toshiba-3
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by Toshiba-3 »

Ahh turns out you're right, I might've misread Demonstration of BRender's lighting features, coloured lights in indexed colour mode :(
But the question still stands, how does that black colouring occur: Image
It seems like it is spread from vertices onto the model, but it could be directly applied on the texels in memory. There's a demo (pick) that let the user paint directly on the texture.

And for the sake of information, here's how a material slot used to be defined at first:

Code: Select all

material = [
	identifier = "charles";
	colour = [173, 173, 173];
	ambient = 0.15;
	diffuse = 0.35;
	specular = 0.15;
	power = 10;
	flags = [always_visible, two_sided, light,smooth,perspective];
	colour_map = "charles.pix";
	index_base = 0;
	index_range = 168;
	index_shade = "charles.tab";
	map_transform = [[1.0,0],[0,1.0],[0.0,0.0]];
];
It was much more user-friendly for editing :ssmile:
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coffeycup
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by coffeycup »

Wow that reflection looks great. I'm going to guess it wasn't implemented at the time because of performance. In 1997 most PCs probably didn't have the processing power to keep up.
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coffeycup
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by coffeycup »

Any progress on figuring out how reflections work? Adding reflections to some !water would be a nice thing to be able to do.
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Toshiba-3
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Re: Welcome to 1996 - Argonaut's BRender glory!

Post by Toshiba-3 »

Coffeycup: no luck so far, my guess is that it isn't implemented into C1, and that this demo does the computing between both blendtables on its own.
However it's difficult to test within C1 given the amout of tab files loaded. You never know which has priority over the others etc.
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